In certain engineering fields, there is a marked tendency to increase the number of structures made of composite materials and indeed in sectors such as the aeronautical sector many of the basic structures used in aircraft, such as fuselages and wings, may be produced using composite materials.
These structures include different components that can be produced using pieces of composite-material fabric with carbon fibres arranged with different orientations.
These structures are designed using a complex process that includes stages for making calculations, designing the fabric model and analysing the feasibility of producing its different components, with feedback loops when changes are made to any of these stages.
Engineers specialising in calculations use calculation programs to calculate the performance of each part under given loads, and design engineers use CAD systems and the specifications provided by the results of the calculation to analyse and design the different components, including generation of fabric models, i.e. determining the placement and outline of the pieces of fabric that make up the sheets.
In the current state of the art in the different design activities mentioned for components in a composite-material structure, multi-cell surfaces obtained during the calculation stage are used as “master geometries” for the structure in question. The problem with using these multi-cell surfaces is that errors may occur in certain stages of the design of the components in these structures, in particular when updating the solid models and/or fabric models, as a result of changes in the master geometry. Moreover, these updating processes require a lot of time to complete, which lengthens the design process.
This invention is intended to resolve these issues.